The Fuzzy-Wuzzy Man (The Duty and Destiny Series, Book 3)

by Andrew Wareham

  They came finally in sight of the mountains of the Papues, entered the muddy Gulf, inhospitable and known only by the reputation for cannibalism of the local tribes.

  Water would have been welcome, as ever, but to reach it meant crossing the reef and penetrating an estuary far inland.

  “Fever coast, Mr Forshaw – mangrove swamp and mud. Not worth it.”

  They kept a distance off the reef, well out of mosquito range.

  Deep into the Gulf, off the mouth of what was later named the Fly River, Frederick was called urgently on deck.

  “Starboard bow, sir, two cables off.”

  A log, a tree trunk it seemed, seven or eight miles out to sea, at least four fathoms long, perhaps a fathom across at its widest, its tail sweeping sinuously.

  “What is it? Bosomtwi, do you know?”

  “Crocodile, sir. Biggest I ever see, isn’t it. A sea crocodile. They don’t live at sea, back at home, sir.”

  “No swimming, Mr Forshaw.”

  Forshaw had suggested a sail over the side for the men off watch to splash in when they hove-to in the dusk – the heat and humidity would have made it very welcome.

  Every free man on the ship was at the rail, peering and pointing.

  “I don’t think you could order the men to go over the side, sir, not now.”

  The quarterdeck was crowded as well, all four lieutenants, the scar across Jackman’s face scarlet in the heat, and itching from the way his hand rose to it, was irritably pulled away as soon as he realised what he was doing. Young Warren stood at his side, quietly chatting – he had chosen not to follow his uncle into Cobra, both feeling the relationship could create difficulties in a new ship. Five midshipmen spoke very quietly, their hands clasped behind their backs, never in their pockets, discussed a collective note for their journals.

  The admiral had forced an extra body upon them at the last moment, but all four newcomers were competent, although varying in age, experience and gentility. Volunteers had come forward in plenty, five or six for every place available, and they had had to select of the best, and of those most strongly recommended. Summers, and then, finally, Lee, had come from the flagship, Centurion, 74, sixteen year olds with five years actually served and needing a degree of responsibility that a frigate could offer and a liner never would; both, as befitted a flag, were younger sons of the peerage, but were, despite this, potentially good officers. Luscombe was a young able seaman, bred in the Newcastle colliers, like Captain Cook, and most earnestly backed by his captain; his papers showed him to have been five years a warrant officer, a certain creativity having crept in, but he had no need to learn to hand, reef and steer, was literate and intuitively mathematical. Chalmers had been an apprentice on one of the prizes, was intelligent and willing, at fourteen could navigate competently; his father, a shopkeeper in Margate, had just been able to buy his son’s indentures, could never have been able to set him up a second time, and the boy was anxious to excel, to grip this lifeline so fortuitously made available. Young Simons was abashed in their company, tried his best to match his new companions…

  A week in the Papuan Gulf and they came to hate it – fishing was impossible, their lines bringing in only heads, a slicing dorsal fin inevitably appearing as they brought their catch to the surface; the few islands were low and barren, the shoreline inhospitable. A single attempt to close the coast at a more inviting lagoon brought out a mass of near-naked warriors carrying stone axes and fire-hardened spears, silent apart from the thudding of a few kundu hand drums.

  “Sharks, crocodiles, mosquitoes and mud, and they want to fight us for it! No thank’ee, Mr Forshaw, they can keep it. About ship!”

  The annual voyage of the lakatoi, sea-going double hulls with crab-claw wicker sails, was over, down coast on the dry wind, back on the monsoon, clay pots traded for sago, and the coast seemed dead, unenterprising, poverty stricken beyond redemption.

  They were glad to reach the islands, to work their way through the archipelago and then north between the mainland and what was later named New Ireland, coincidentally, perhaps, a troubled, poor and beautiful island.

  New Britain came in sight to larboard, the rich lands of the Tolai clustered on the peninsula below the smoking volcanoes and around the great harbour. The low plateau and coastal lands were covered feet deep in rich, volcanic topsoil, fertile beyond belief; the Tolai, in flight in one of the great Pacific migrations, had found the land a few hundred years before, slaughtered its inhabitants and settled in their villages, cheerfully cannibal, at war with the Bainings people to south and west and willing to fight all comers. Their main weapon was a sling, nearly a fathom long, extended by the foot and hurling a fist-sized rock accurately over a cable; on clear ground they outranged and outhit a musket, and they had no qualms about entering a debate with a cannon. A destroyed village near Raluana Point suggested they had done so, not wholly unsuccessfully – there was a burned out ship’s boat on the black sand beach.

  Book Three: The Duty and Destiny Series

  Chapter Three

  The great harbour, more than twenty miles across, was vaguely circular, a caldera, hundreds of fathoms deep immediately offshore, a huge crater formed in a single explosion greater than Krakatoa would be, and from the same cause. At some period a volcano had erupted onshore, a fissure had opened under the sea and the magma chamber had filled with an inrush of millions of tons of sea water which had flashed instantly into superheated steam that had blown the mountain into dust and probably had clouded the skies of the whole world for years.

  Frederick listened interestedly to the master’s learned exposition – frequent references to Knossos – and was deeply impressed.

  “That must have been a hell of a big bang, Mr Ferrier!”

  He surveyed the ridge line and rich coastal land, a deep emerald green, heavily cultivated, prosperous landscape, the sort of place that would make a colony, the only worthwhile spot he had seen in the whole of the Papues, an obvious place for the French to examine.

  “Close the shore, Mr Ferrier. Boats to tow and then clear, I believe. The French have certainly been here, as we saw, and may well still be. They are searching for a site for a colony, and this seems good to me.”

  The gap in the crater wall opened slowly, masked at first by the islands in the outer channel, but eventually they gained a clear view of a stretch of flat coast below three faintly smoking volcanoes, of five European vessels at anchor off a freshwater creek.

  “Frigate, country ship, brig and two schooners, sir. Boarding netting rigged, sir, except on the country ship which is watering. No signs of earthworks, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mr Somers.”

  “Bright lad, that – no shore battery set up, though they have been forewarned - the schooner from Nieuw Leiden is there.”

  “Hostile population, sir,” Forshaw replied. “Boarding netting and watering one at a time, too big a risk to fill all of their barrels at once – any men ashore must be under heavy guard. Destroying the one village may well have brought the others out against them. There seems to be something going on at that place we can see up coast, sir.”

  There was a village about two miles distant, a little inland but still on the flat.

  “Can you put your glass on it, Mr Ferrier?”

  The master had a long, old brass telescope, of very high magnification, difficult to hold on a moving ship, ideal in sheltered waters. He focussed carefully, gave a commentary.

  “A bigger village than those we saw on the Gulf, sir. About forty huts, rectangular, some must be twenty feet on the long side. Woven cane, the walls, by the look of it, thickly thatched. Set under the palms, an open square of grass in the middle, a couple or three acres, like a village green. Gardens all about, can’t see what they’re growing. Bananas, a lot of them round three sides, going up the hill till the water runs out, by the seem of it. Tall, rough grassland behind, kunai grass as high as a man. Unusual for a native place, sir, flowers all about the village, frangipan
i and hibiscus and bougainvillea, set in gardens, and there’s a gulley to one side full of some sort of bush, you can just see the pink of it. Some big trees, like the rain tree they have in India, by a creek, I expect. Must be a thousand people there, sir, watching something under the shade of the coconuts, I can’t really see… they’re coming forward, sir, dancing or parading, must be fifty of them… they’re men, I can see their legs. A big costume of some sort of leaves and a pointy head with eyes painted on – a bit like a big bird, a sort of ostrich like they had in Cape Town, sir. The people watching are women and children and old men, I can see a lot of men round some sort of fires, cooking hearths or something, they’re eating and drinking, sir, staggering jerkily some of them, waving spears and clubs.”

  The Dukduks and Tubuans of all of the Tolai villages had danced down to the coast, followed by their younger men, had congregated within sight of the invader. The men were now drinking a decoction of fruit and coconut milk, fermented in the sun, a form of toddy, and smoking leaves from a local wild-growing cannabis; they were chewing betelnut as well, mixed with quicklime and daka, the shoot of a particular tree. Normally the bright scarlet juice resulting was spat out and the effect of the buai was to dull hunger and reduce tiredness; today they were swallowing the drug and those who did not instantly fall into a coma were beginning to experience a berserk drunkenness much prized by Melanesian warriors and fire-dancers.

  Knowing none of this, Ferrier could still see the makings of a thoroughly bad-tempered war party.

  “The Frogs will not want to be cast ashore here, sir, would certainly prefer to run.”

  “The wind is fluky in the bay, as well, and the monsoon is less reliable here – we could lose them in a chase. Seven hours of daylight, I believe, Mr Forshaw – time enough to do our business. All Hands!”

  Both ships were cleared already, but the formal cry had to be made – tradition demanded it.

  “Cobra close within hail.”

  “Immediate attack, Mr Warren, larboard tack, from the south with the wind gage. Charybdis will deal with Nantes and the brig, Cobra to engage the country ship. I assume they will stay at anchor in line so they can put all of their men to their broadside, they will be short-handed by now. Destroy the schooners, they are of no use to us. Sink, burn or take the other three as is appropriate.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Fighting sail?”

  “Not until the hammering starts, we may have to claw off, there may be shallows in the bay, the courses will be necessary. Single reef for now.”

  Ferrier agreed, reluctantly; ships had been lost through their own muzzle-flash setting the courses afire, but the monsoon made this less likely, the canvas was thoroughly wet from the night’s rain.

  “Sir, boats putting off the schooners, crews going aboard the ships.”

  That made sense – the schooners could have no part to play in any exchange of broadsides, they were too small, lightly armed, fragile.

  Forshaw came running the length of the ship – as second-in-command he would keep well clear of the captain in action, so that there was less chance of the one broadside killing both.

  “Sir, both schooners came to single anchor before their boats pulled away, and their sails are loosely furled.”

  Ferrier turned his big glass on the two single-masters. “They are indeed, sir. And, unless I am much mistook, that was a hidden man moving, the flash of a bottle in the sun.”

  “Why? They can do us no harm – a couple of four pounders, a swivel or two, they can be the source of no sudden ambush. Were their belowdecks cram-packed they could not carry fifty boarders between them. They could hardly be proposing to escape – they have nowhere to run to, could not expect to reach the Mauritius without a full crew.”

  Forshaw, rarely, had no explanation to offer.

  “Chase gun, Mr Forshaw. I don’t know what they have in mind, but if we sink ‘em we’ll put a stop to it!”

  “They could not have it in mind to ram, sir?”

  “Too small to do any harm, Mr Ferrier, surely, unless… they have no great use for them, now, the bulk of their scouting must be done, and the Frogs are heathen, barbarian buggers - infernal, in fact!”

  Frederick was rather proud of this laborious sally, was disappointed that it went wholly unnoticed.

  “Infernal machines, gentlemen?”

  Comprehension dawned – fireships, no less.

  “Ah, yes, sir – infernal machines for infernal buggers, sir, very witty! Ha, ha!”

  Perhaps his genius did not lend itself to persiflage: a pity!

  “Deal with them, Mr Forshaw.”

  “One round to warm the barrel, sir, one each to gut them – tiny, frail things they are, will not stand a single round square on the bows.”

  Six minutes, half a mile traversed, two reloads, both schooners a mass of flame, sinking at anchor, two jolly boats with three men apiece rowing furiously to Nantes. A great crowd of Tolai warriors galloping along the shore towards the battle, drums thudding out of time, otherwise silent, saving their breath, the birdlike figures of the Dukduks toiling along behind, womenfolk following at a discreet distance carrying what looked remarkably like cooking pots.

  “A lot of them black men got ginger hair, isn’t it,” came Bosomtwi’s voice, strongly disapproving of this genetic freak, neither natural nor desirable, in his opinion.

  Sympathetic mutters came from his many friends in the crew, “only heathens, mate, what don’t know no better!”

  “Burning well, master!”

  “Very pretty blaze, sir! Olive oil and brandy in barrels, I should imagine, sir – very pale, those flames.”

  “And all wasted – no spirits rations for those Frogs.”

  Vicious chuckles came from the men – they knew just how much the sight must be hurting the French matelots, knew how they themselves would have grieved for their rum rations.

  “They will have had slow match alight, ready to set their blaze, sir, and their kindling will have been overset and all afire in a moment.”

  “Nasty things, fireships, Mr Ferrier.”

  “Could have finished us, sir; would certainly have left us open, defenceless for ten minutes, long enough for Nantes to get under way and cross our bows.”

  Frederick nodded – it would have been natural enough to have simply ignored the schooners, dismissing them as insignificant, prizes to be snapped up later and provide good training for master’s mates and midshipmen, prize masters in turn.

  “Strip to fighting sail now, I think, master.”

  Nantes, the brig and the country ship were moored in a slightly offset line, anchored fore and aft, west to east, the southwesterly wind blowing across their bows, half a cable apart, further than might have been expected.

  Charybdis led, head almost due east, Cobra at fifty yards, precisely in her wake, parallel to the French line and in easy carronade range.

  “On deck!”

  “Captain, sir!”

  The shouts from foretop and chaser came together, arms pointing to the country ship, hauling on a spring attached to her stern anchor cable and veering out from the forecastle, swinging her through ninety degrees, bringing her broadside onto Charybdis’ bows where her mix of long and short guns could do most damage.

  “Open fire, Mr Forshaw!”

  The chaser’s deep explosion followed instantly, its ball smashing into the teak hull just above the waterline, the great bulk of its cloud of splinters wasted.

  “When you are ready, Mr Jackman!”

  A wait of a few seconds, the uproll just commencing and the roar of the first broadside, all together and smashing home into the Nantes’ main deck. Almost simultaneously the country ship opened, her aim the Charybdis’ masts and rigging where the topmen were still shortening sail. The nets quivered to falling blocks, cordage and bodies; blood dripped onto the deck. The carronades fired again as Nantes poured in a careful, rolling broadside, as if one man had run the length of her gundeck taking final aim. Charybdis’ hul
l rang to the twelve pound shot hitting home; men fell, replacements ran into the gun crews, the first bodies were carried below, the first screams rose, powder smoke blew forward in eddying clouds.

  Frederick ran to the stern rail, cupped his hands, bellowed.

  “Mr Warren! Lay yourself across the country ship’s stern. Gut her!” A man ran from Cobra’s chaser, repeating the message.

  “Mr Ferrier! Lay us between the two. Anchor. Bows on to the brig.”

  Rapid helm orders, sail stripped, topmen running between the guncrews and trying to keep out from underfoot, a second controlled broadside, all long guns together, the carronades independent, firing as fast as they could. Nantes’ second coming in, slowly, as if she were already hurt. The country ship fired again, still high, wilder, her gunners not yet fully trained. The brig joined in, her nine pounders low in Charybdis’ hull – her gunners had been transferred to Nantes, it transpired, and the inexperienced men left had not thought to hammer in the quoins, to elevate their pieces to hit the main deck.

  A roaring crash from Cobra, the sounds of smashing timber and howling in instant response. The big carronades thumped again inside the minute and the country ship fell silent, colours still flying.

  “Very good work, sir! Ball to open her up, then grape the length of her gundeck, now another broadside of ball while the carronades pour it in hot. She’s dead, sir.” LeGrys sounded utterly dispassionate, leaning against the binnacle with notebook, pencil and watch.

  “Both sides, Mr Jackman!”